Alongside the rhetoric of the main speakers, the organizers, the National Endowment for Democracy, had put on a series of practical workshops focused on regional issues or technical skills such as online advocacy.
Some found them more helpful than others.
‘These events are of little use in terms of knowledge but are good for promoting your cause and making contacts,’ Cheng said.
Seelan Palay, a young political activist from Singapore, was more upbeat. ‘I’ve been to many similar conferences before and have learned at least one thing each time, whether it’s a new skill base or approach,’ he said. ‘Things like how to bend the rules or go around them and using video and the internet to further your cause.’
In a city-state such as Singapore, where the ruling party dominates politics and the media and an atmosphere of fear and self-censorship pervades, democratic and social activism can be a lonely pursuit.
Palay said he took strength from meeting others engaged in the same battle. ‘It’s good to know other people are going through similar struggles elsewhere,’ he said.
It was certainly rousing listening to people like Tapera Kapuya, a former Zimbabwean student leader who ‘was abducted in the middle of the night from my student hostel, electrocuted, made to stand in a bucket of acidic water, beaten and dumped on the outskirts of Harare’ before being exiled from university at the age of 21 and continuing his fight in South Africa and Australia.
‘My story is the same for many young people struggling for democracy across the world,’ he said. ‘But young activists are finding creative ways to organize themselves without violence.’
For delegates such as Abdi Suryaningati, a board member of Indonesia’s Civil Society Alliance For Democracy, the benefits of these sorts of gatherings are less spiritual than technical. She said that her organization, which promotes political education and empowerment, had learned from Brazilian NGOs about the practice of ‘participatory budgeting,’ where activists help citizens to hold local governments to account over their budgets. Now her organization assists other NGOs from around Asia.
Elsewhere, the attempts to foster cross-border links sometimes seemed like a dialogue of the deaf. During a session on the wider lessons that could be learnt from Indonesia’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy, Khin Maung Win, deputy director of the Democratic Voice of Burma, a Norway-based broadcaster, rose to quiz the panel of eminent Indonesians.
Many of Burma’s neighbours, he said, accept at face value the junta’s argument that a strong military is vital to keep the country together given the profusion of separatist conflicts. But didn’t Indonesia’s experience show that a democratic government was actually better placed to resolve such issues?
One of the panellists was Agus Widjojo, a former general who was at the forefront of Indonesia’s drive to take the military out of politics. Having been sent by Yudhoyono to Burma to speak to the generals after they crushed the anti-government protests in 2007, he seemed the ideal person to answer this question. But he responded obliquely.
‘We can’t export democracy, it has to have self-ownership,’ he said. ‘Although we’d like to see democracy flourish, we understand this limit.’
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Thomas
“Can You Teach Democracy?”…That depends…can you convince people to believe in MEDIOCRITY???! The answer is obviously yes…the same way that you can convince people that a man can walk on water then turn it to win or others to blow themselves up for 72 virgins in the afterlife!